The Pool Worthy Goon Squad

Yesterday, the announcement was made that penalty minutes would be one of the mini-games, if you were looking to try and get your money back in the pool, assuming you've tanked in the scoring race.  Hell, maybe you're in it for the penalty minutes, just to be ironical, this season and you want the biggest and baddest goon squad and virtually play for nothing.

Well, what if you had the best of both worlds?  A pool-worthy team, which racked up their minutes in the box.  What would that look like?

Yes, we're a month away from the draft and I'm really struggling to keep this blog interesting.

So, in order to be pool-worthy, I am working with last season's parameters, a 23-team league, which means you'd have to be in the top 184 forwards, top 92 defensemen and top 46 goalies, in order to be included.  We'll take the top penalty minutes from those ranked players to form our team and see how many points & minutes they've racked up.

Forward	NHL	Points	PIM
David Backes	STL	58	104
Scott Hartnell	CBJ	60	100
Brad Marchand	BOS	42	95
Chris Kreider	NYR	46	88
Shane Doan	ARI	36	88
Pat Maroon	ANA	34	82
Milan Lucic	LOS	44	81
Gabriel Landeskog	COL	59	79
Defense
Dustin Byfuglien	WPG	45	124
Dion Phaneuf	TOR	29	108
Simon Despres	ANA	23	86
Travis Hamonic	NYI	33	85
Goalies
Jonathan Quick	LOS	85	18
Mike Smith	ARI	29	10
		623	1,148

By comparison, this team is actually pretty darn good.  The PIM column would blow just about everyone out of the water, because the rest of the pool worthy players wouldn't match up, but the scoring wasn't too bad either.  The 623 points would have had this team in the top 10 in scoring, which is pretty decent.

This team would have a reasonable 1st round pick in Jonathan Quick, who led all goalies in having their teammates spend time in the box for them.  They'd also have another starting goalie on their side, even though he played on a pretty poor Arizona team in Mike Smith.

The 2nd round pick from this team could be either Scott Hartnell from Columbus or, if one was so inclined to jump on the blueline train early on, Dustin Byfuglien of the Jets.  Both got decent points at their position, both hitting triple-digits in the penalty minute column.

There is some more decent talent up front, as Gabriel Landeskog could be thought of in the 4th round area, David Backes not too far away from that either.  Those two are both relied upon for some gritty play at both ends of the ice and their leadership skills.

A couple more captains were taken on this team, somewhat of an interesting trend on this goon squad, as Shane Doan in Arizona and Dion Phaneuf in Toronto would play prominent roles in their positions as well.

It would be a very interesting team in the 2016 season, if you were to piece this one together.

Just for argument's sake, if there was another team, which was drafted along side the pool worthy squad, based on what was left for PIM, you would get something like this.

Forwards	NHL	Points	PIM
Steve Downie	ARI	28	238
Cody McLeod	COL	12	191
Derek Dorsett	VAN	25	175
Tom Wilson	WAS	17	172
Antoine Roussel	DAL	25	148
Brandon Prust	VAN	18	134
Ryan Reaves	STL	12	116
Matt Martin	NYI	14	114
Defense
Mark Borowiecki	OTT	11	107
Eric Gryba	EDM	12	97
Robert Bortuzzo	STL	8	93
Adam McQuaid	BOS	7	85
Goalies
Corey Crawford	CHI	69	8
Tuukka Rask	BOS	74	8
		332	1,686